CBR18 Bingo: Or – Philippe is constantly having to choose between his relationships with Isabel and other women, who care for him on a personal level, and his relationships with the sons of Henry II, which line up instead with his grand ambitions.
Isabel of Hainault is married off to the young king of France as a child. Her beauty and her charm makes everyone around her fall under her spell, but Philippe’s ambitions may be stronger than their relationship.
This book is a work of serious historical fiction where it covers Philippe-Auguste’s reign and military ambitions. It’s also a work of questionable erotica when it comes to Philippe-Auguste’s personal relationship with his wife, several other women, and with not one, not even two, but all four sons of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitane.
Combine that with a shocking amount of incest and pedophilia (all, of course, completely unsubstantiated by the historical record), and I’m not really sure what was going through the writer’s mind. That the plot would be more or less unchanged without these elements lays bare how gratuitous it is.
Anyway, I did learn a lot about this period of French and English history, and was impressed by how much of the politics of the time really were family squabbles more than everything else – King Henry even seems to regard Philippe-Auguste as some sort of erstwhile step-son.
I was also pretty interested in the push and pull between Philippe-Auguste’s relationships with women and his relationships with the Plantagenet sons – the former all give him the whole-hearted support and love he desires from the Plantagenets, but he seems to always care more about what he can’t have.
